An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race.
In search of lost Black lives.
Literary scholar Nabugodi melds memoir and deep archival research to investigate six prominent writers—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron—with the goal of tracing the Romantics’ “racial imaginary”: that is, “how the existence of racial slavery infested their creative imaginations.” As a biracial Black woman, she brings an acute sensitivity to her search, of texts and artifacts, for “undead legacies of slavery.” At St. John’s College, Cambridge, she visits the Slavery and Abolition Collection, which houses documents representing debates, pro and con, about enslavement and whose holdings include Wordsworth’s favorite teacup. Like other Britons of his time, she observes, Wordsworth benefited from slave labor each time he mindlessly stirred sugar into his tea. Letters from plantation managers to British owners, conveying slaves’ valuations, horrify her; she is buoyed by reports of resistance and escape by those slaves whom owners damned as “distempered.” Among many disquieting discoveries, she finds that Coleridge, once an ardent abolitionist, became a white supremacist after encountering precepts of scientific racism, which placed the so-called Caucasian race at the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy and Blacks at the bottom. Both Keats’ death mask and his poetic allusions point to a reverence for classical Greek—and white—aesthetics. Byron’s orthopedic boots, which he wore to compensate for a physical impairment, lead Nabugodi to consider a link between disability and Blackness. Byron, like Black people, was made to feel inferior—even cursed—by others’ attitudes about his physical difference. “Romantic-era ideals about beauty and grandeur,” she writes, “are impossible to disentangle from the period’s white supremacist worldview.” Each of the figures she investigates, she discovers to her dismay, sorrow, and anger, was intricately embedded in the slave economy.
An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593536469
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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